Misc Vietnam Related Commentary For Aug 24, 2004

— Normally, this would be a big story, but it seems to have gone largely unnoticed in all the Vietnam hubbub that’s going on right now…

“Scott O’Grady, the Air Force pilot who captured headlines in 1995 when he survived being shot down over Bosnia, on Friday said Sen. John Kerry committed “treason” during the Vietnam War.

O’Grady, in an appearance with other military veterans coordinated by President Bush’s re-election campaign, said Kerry helped push North Vietnam’s proposals for the United States to withdraw at a time when the two countries were still officially at war.

“I see that as treason,” said O’Grady, who lives in Texas and has been speaking at veterans events for Bush around the country. He’s now retired from the military.

….O’Grady said he was referring to Kerry’s 1971 appearance before the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations. In response to a question about how he proposed to end the war, Kerry mentioned that he was involved in peace talks in Paris.

“I have talked with both delegations at the peace talks, that is to say the Democratic Republic of Vietnam and the Provisional Revolutionary Government,” Kerry told the panel, according to a transcript.

A U.S. law prohibits citizens from negotiating with foreign governments on matters such as peace treaties.”

I wonder how many people know John Kerry was meeting with and talking up the proposals of the North Vietnamese even while our soldiers were dying in the field?

— This quote from Bob Dole is fantastic,

“One day, (Kerry’s) saying that we were shooting civilians, cutting off their ears, cutting off their heads, throwing away his medals or his ribbons. The next day, he’s standing there, ‘I want to be president because I’m a Vietnam veteran.’ Maybe he should apologize to all the other 2.5 million veterans who served.” — Bob Dole

Have you ever considered just how big of a transformation John Kerry has made over the years? He made his name originally as Vietnam war protestor, another Jane Fonda, another Ramsey Clark. He threw away his medals, smeared all the troops serving in Vietnam, & even met with the enemy — in France of all places.

Now today, as Bob Dole said, it’s vote for me as “president because I’m a Vietnam veteran”. That’s really a fundamentally dishonest tactic and it’s actually surprising that it took so long for him to get called on it publicly by someone of Bob Dole’s stature.

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“But three Purple Hearts and never bled that I know of. I mean, they’re all superficial wounds. Three Purple Hearts and you’re out.”

It’s true that Kerry had very minor wounds, but he did bleed on multiple occasions.

— Have you noticed how differently the Swift Boat Vets for Truth (SBVFT) and the much, much, smaller group of vets for Kerry (KV) are being treated? The mainstream media…

* …is deeply skeptical of everything the SBVFT say, while what the KV say is treated as gospel.

* …has gone to bizarre lengths to try to tie the SBVFT to the Bush campaign. But, the Kerry campaign is keeping tight control over what the KV say and the media seems to have no problem with that.

* …has dug into the backgrounds of the SBVFT, openly questioned their honesty, and has passed along smears intended to reduce their credibility. On the other hand, I haven’t seen any evidence that the media has even investigated the background of the KV.

*…has attempted to impugn the credibility of the SBVFT by pointing out that they’re backed by “Republican money”. Yet, the ads run by the Kerry campaign featuring the KV are of course funded by “Democratic money”. Moreover, do we know what sort of funds the Kerry campaign is spending on the KV? Are they taking care of plane fare, hotel bills, & expenses? Are they being given any “walking around money”?

So why are the KV getting a complete free pass from the media while the SBVFT are getting the standard media “anal exam”? We all know why — because the KV are helping the candidate the mainstream media favors and the SBVFT are hurting him. If the situation were reversed and a Republican President was being defended by a small group of vets by a group 10 times their size that said he was lying, you can bet the treatment of the two groups of vets would be exactly reversed.

— Just check out these 5 paragraphs from Mark Steyn’s latest exquisite, yet lethal piece and I think you’ll see why so many people consider him to be the finest columnist walking the earth today…

“Pat Oliphant, who appears in the Washington Post and many other newspapers, offered a cartoon showing the Swiftees as Bush-backing deadbeats sitting round a bar b*tching: “I never seen Kerry do nothing hee-roic,” says one loser. “[email protected] right,” says another. “You and me was right there in latrine maintenance. We orta know.”

The redneck spelling’s a nice touch, ain’t it? I wonder which of the anti-Kerry campaign’s 254 Swift vets, including 17 of Lieutenant Kerry’s 23 fellow officers, Oliphant thinks were in latrine maintenance. Maybe he’s got in mind fellows like Paul Galanti, who appears in the latest anti-Kerry ad and whose plane went down over North Vietnam in 1966. He was held in the “Hanoi Hilton” Viet Cong POW camp until 1973. That’s seven years getting tortured by the g**ks, only to be mocked by some lame-o cartoonist as a redneck latrine operator.

I’ve never quite understood the preferred formulation of big-time Democrats – that “of course” they support our troops even though they oppose this war. But in practice they “support our troop” – singular – just Lieut Kerry and the handful of Swiftees willing to appear in public with him. The rest can go to hell and any of ’em impertinent enough to question the Senator are just “sleazoids” wading through their own backed-up latrine. I wonder if the Kerry campaign and its media cheerleaders have really thought this one through.

Nothing the “sleazoids” say about Kerry is as bad as what he said about them 33 years ago in his testimony to Congress, when he informed the world that his comrades – his “band of brothers” – had “personally raped, cut off ears, cut off heads” etc, throughout their time in Vietnam.

Unlike John O’Neill’s book, he didn’t bother to give specifics: the US Army in general was rife with ear-severers. If you want to know why Paul Galanti is appearing in an anti-Kerry ad, it’s because he first heard about this speech from his Viet Cong captors who cited it to try to persuade him and his fellow prisoners that resistance was now futile and they might as well cross over to the other side.”